The poetics of mourning or loss: a study in Angeliki Sidira’s poetry

This study aims to present lament in contemporary Greek poetry as it emerges through Angeliki Sidira's poems. The poetics of mourning allows poets to highlight a multitude of other themes around death (existential anguish, illness and therapy, social anguish and protest). Angeliki Sidira is the main contemporary Greek representative of the subgenre, connecting lamentation and rage through a feminine perspective and domestic poetry. Her poetry opposes the traditional image of a woman in poetry and replaces her at home as a mother, wife and daughter. Sidira's poetry expands the way in which the dynamics of the feminine can be understood, through the pain of loss and its place in the home; it offers new ways of reading the relationship between emotional life and the broader social and political contexts that have shaped gender perceptions. Poetics of mourning or loss abandon the elegiac praise of the dead highlighting memory and pain. The autobiography of a female writer is an act of liberation, as it reveals political aspects through personal experience and social gender roles.